Plans to Complete Canal Trail Come into Focus

The current end of the Canal Trail at Aircraft Road, looking south. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

About a year ago, Southington finished work on a 1.27 mile section of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail that runs from Lazy Lane north to Aircraft Road. Bicyclists and pedestrians can now travel past I-84 as far the rusting remains of the old Pratt & Whitney complex. With the completion of that segment, another missing piece has been added to a trail project that, once finished, will run all the way from the New Haven shoreline to central Massachusetts.

But Southington’s task is not yet done. The stretch of trail running from Aircraft Road to the Southington-Plainville border on Townline Road is still missing. State funds are in place to cover the costs of the trail improvements, but it is up to the town to finalize a plan for the route and make sure all the stakeholders are on board so that work can begin.

It has been a long and often frustrating process. In recent years, Town Council Chair Paul Chaplinsky has been helping to lead the effort. On a call with the Outsider, he recounted the recent history of the effort, described the problems with the first two routes that were considered, and sketched out a third route that may turn out to be the one that gets implemented.

Plan A: Aircraft-West Queen–Redstone

“The original design that town staff came up with,” Chaplinsky said, “is to have the trail go west on Aircraft Road from its current endpoint. Aircraft Road dead ends on a pedestrian bridge. That bridge is currently barricaded, and not in service. It was going to cost a million dollars to replace it.”

“Another issue occurs after you take Aircraft Road to West Queen St, after that pedestrian bridge. To get across West Queen Street to Redstone Road on your way to Townline, you need to go east on West Queen. That’s a safety challenge."

"The Public Works subcommittee that was taking a look at it had concerns there. West Queen is a racetrack. It’s got two lanes going westbound and cars that are accelerating. It’s common to see cars doing 50mph plus. The question is, how do you get pedestrians safely across three lanes of traffic? Remember that some of them are with dogs, some with little kids learning how to ride a bike.”

Plan B: Working on the Railroad

“So we paused and asked, why is it that we’re going down Aircraft Road? Why not just continue along the train track, which is not in use, towards Townline Road? All we would need is access to Birch Street.”

Plan B: extending the current trail along the old rails (red) and Birch Street (blue). IMAGE COURTESY OF PAUL CHAPLINSKY

“We started to talk to the rail company, but they were going through an acquisition. So we paused and said, let’s wait for this acquisition to go through, to see if the new stakeholders would be willing to talk to us.” The new company was Gennesse and Wyoming Rail Services.

“We waited six, eight, nine months," Chaplinsky continued. "We finally got to the leadership of the new organization and they said, ‘we’ll take a look at this, but no guarantees’. Finally, after 18 months and numerous calls, they brought this to their real estate committee. That is a joint committee belonging to the new organization and the old organization which still had some legal tentacles in the new one.”

“They came back to us and said, ‘we never know if we’re going to use that segment of the trail. There’s a growing need for commuter rails. Maybe someday this will be a commuter rail’.”

Chaplinsky paused to let what he saw as the mild absurdity of the idea sink in. “We pushed back and said, ‘you know, guys, it’s a quarter-mile long. It’s already defunct, it’s not being used, and the rails are paved over.”

“But they held firm and said we’re not going to give it up. We asked if they would donate it to us, if they would give us a lease, if we could purchase the property outright. They were not interested in anybody using the rail that would change its current state.”

“In a nutshell, that’s where we are. We weren’t in a rush because the Plainville side was also delayed. Some tenants up there are suing about the property takings. We said, let’s do this right.”

Plan C: Newell-West Queen–Redstone

“At that point we started thinking again about options. We regrouped with the DOT, with the Public Works team, and town staff in Engineering and asked ourselves some questions.”

“Should we go back to the original plan – and if so, how do we work on that intersection of Aircraft Road and West Queen and Redstone to make it safer? Or – and this is what we’re working on now – should we take the trail from where it now ends and go north on Newell Street, then, at the intersection with West Queen, go west on West Queen?”

“There is a potential crossing at that 4-way stop [of Newell and West Queen]. We could close the right hand lane of West Queen from the intersection at Newell all the way to Redstone. We would put some barriers up, maybe some landscaping, and at Redstone it would pick up northward again.”

Plan C: the trail goes one block on Newell before turning west on West Queen and occupying one of its three lanes. IMAGE COURTESY OF PAUL CHAPLINSKY

Plan C: the entire Southington route (red). GOOGLE MAPS SCREENSHOT

“We have to talk to Yarde Metals and A. Duie Pyle that have properties along this route. We are also waiting from feedback from the DOT and our town engineering. Those [plans A and C] would be the two options that would go from town staff to the Public Works subcommittee, and then to Town Council. That’s where we are now.”

Local Benefits

The question, why put all this effort into building the trail, can be answered simply by visiting the trail on a nice day and watching all the walkers, joggers, bicyclists, stroller-pushing parents, and enthusiastic dogs parade by. The trail encourages recreation and a bit of community spirit as people share the public amenity.

Beyond the benefits to the public from recreation, the trail has been good for nearby businesses. Josh Norris at Kinsmen Brewery said the foot traffic helps keep his taproom busy. “At another brewery where I worked, there was no foot traffic. People came on planned visits in their cars and left that way. Here there are people from the trail who come in all the time.”

Justin Dawley, the owner of Vue Brewing Company on Lazy Lane, seconds that. He estimates that since he opened last summer, up to the 30% of his business has come from trail users curious about his low-gluten beer selection.

“The trail is still in its infancy,” Chaplinsky observed, “especially when you think in terms of development along it. I think you’re going to see more places pop up along it as time goes by.”

Bicyclists are an especially enthusiastic group of trail users, since the path is one of the few places in the region where they can travel long distances with minimal interference from cars. Norm Berg, an avid cyclist who belongs to the leadership team of the Farmington Canal Rail-to-Trail Association, notes that downtown Southington and Plantsville could attract many more two-wheeled visitors simply by putting out a few bike racks.

Berg has also asked the town to consider having a bike lane painted on the south side of Center Street and cut back the curb on the southeast corner of the Center Street and Liberty Street intersection. That small change, he believes, would pull more visitors into the downtown area around the green - and do so without adding to the current parking congestion.

Problems in Plainville

For the trail to run the length of Connecticut, Southington will certainly have to do its part. Plainville, however, has an even bigger job to do to fill a three-mile gap:

Map of New Haven & Northampton Canal Greenway showing Southington-Plainville gap. SCREENSHOT OF NORTHEAST GREENWAY SOLUTIONS REPORT

Work to fill this gap should be starting soon. The course of the trail through Plainville has been divided into three parts. The southernmost part extends from Townline Road to Norton Park, roughly following the old Farmington Canal through wooded areas. Construction equipment is already in place for this phase of the project, and work should begin once weather and staffing permit. This particular section of the trail is expected to open in the fall of 2027.

The route for the northernmost part of the trail in Plainville has also been decided on. This will extend from Northwest Drive to Route 72 and connect to the existing trail near Farmington. Bids for the project will be taken this summer and work is expected to be complete by 2028.

The central portion of the trail will take the longest time to complete, since no route has been decided on yet. Three different options are on the table for bringing the trail from Norton Park to Route 72. Planners have to navigate wetlands and a dense residential area near the intersection of Broad Street and Route 177. A group of homeowners who do not want the trail passing in front of their houses recently won the support of State Representative Rebecca Martinez in opposing one of the routes. Final plans are not expected until the middle of 2028, which means completion of the entire Connecticut trail project is unlikely before 2030.

PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

DePaolo's Palmieri is State Middle School Principal of the Year

Christopher Palmieri, CAS 2026 Middle School Principal of the Year PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

The tie and jacket combo, the lanyard around his neck bearing the period schedule for the school’s three grades, the office decorated with mementos and inspirational posters – it's the sort of thing you might expect to see when meeting Connecticut’s Middle School Principal of the Year.

But there’s one thing you might not expect – the box of chicken eggs, freshly gathered from the nest, that he's carrying in his hands.

Just before the Outsider came to interview him, Palmieri had been outside attending to the coup that DePaolo Middle School maintains on the farm property next door. Each day he visits the chickens, usually with a small team of student assistants, to check their water and food and collect any eggs they might have laid. The routine allows Palmieri to teach the kids something about caretaking and responsibility. It also gives him a chance to open a line of communication with the students, and let them experience responsibilities as a source of pride and fun.

“To me this job all about connecting with the kids. I remember every day, it’s kids first. I love that quote up there,” he says, gesturing to a poster on his office wall. “‘Children are not a distraction from the more important work. They are the most important work.’ I love it because everything I do, everything the staff does, has to be student-centered.”

Palmieri does a lot of things of that sort at DePaolo. Some activities have him taking kids across the street to Calendar House to volunteer. Others bring principal and students to the animal shelter on Woodruff Street, or the nursery school at Zion Lutheran. The press release from the Connecticut Association of Schools announcing his honor mentions the students who, under his guidance, participate in running the Apple Harvest Festival.

“The kids are so inquisitive at this age. They’re mature, not quite elementary, but they’re not adults either. It’s a time to help them be what they want to be. I want to expose them to many experiences so they can develop into the people they want to be.”

It was the in-between character of middle school students that originally helped him make up his mind to become an educator.

“My undergraduate degree was actually in business administration. After my freshman year, I started substituting in New Britain, where at the time you didn’t need a degree. I started subbing there, and I started getting a passion for it there. So I knew I liked teaching, but there was a missing piece.”

“When I graduated, I started in the middle schools. And that was the missing piece - teaching middle school.”

One of the main challenges in teaching middle school students is helping them to keep the rush of adolescent energies under control in a way that allows them to think and to learn. Along with its dedication to academics and community service, there is a pervasive focus at DePaolo on emotional learning. For that, Palmieri says he has benefited a great deal from a program at Yale that has pioneered this approach to education.

“We have done a lot with Yale’s emotional intelligence program, which is called RULER. It’s run by Marc Brackett. We’ve learn so much from it.”

On his office wall Palmieri has a Mood Meter poster that he uses each day with the students in his advisory group. According to the RULER website, the purpose of the Mood Meter is to “enhance self- and social-awareness and support the development of a nuanced emotion vocabulary and a range of strategies for regulating emotion.”

Palmieri explaining the Mood Meter.

Emotional intelligence is not just something students work on individually. Classroom groups, and even the entire school have sought to articulate how they want to feel – and by extension, how they want to be treated – when they are at school. Everyone from students to teachers and administrators takes part in creating it, and thus everyone has a stake in seeing it work.

“We came up with a charter which asks, how do we want to feel when we are together? We created the question, and you’ll see the answers in the classrooms. Before they can start their learning, student need to be emotionally in a place where they can learn.”

“I’ll show you when we walk out into the hall the one we did a whole school charter as well. The students and the staff all signed it. It’s a honeycomb, a beehive, like a community.”

Palmieri showing off the whole school charter.

After demonstrating the charter, Palmieri made his way to the cafeteria where DePaolo’s 6^th grade lunch was underway. The room was just as crowded as a beehive and as loud, with hundreds of students chatting at the tables with their friends. At the entrance there was a constant stream of students coming and going with bathroom-pass lanyards in hand as they took their last chance for a break before lunch ended.

Grabbing a microphone, Palmieri started calling out the names of students who had won rewards for completing an extra-credit math assignment. The dozen or so who were called came up to claim small bags of chips or popcorn. Each one made their way to the front of the cafe, looked their principal in the eye, and picked out their prize before walking back to their tables.

It’s a big school, with 674 young people. Yet in the space of about five minutes, Palmieri had made a connection with another set of students, those who had taken the initiative to do a bit more academic work. It’s part of his constant effort to build bridges from the world of childhood to the world of adulthood, and invite students to cross it – an effort for which he has now been recognized.

Elementary School Rebuild Plan Faces First Crucial Vote This Week

Flanders Elementary School PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

An ambitious rebuilding plan that will affect four of the town’s eight elementary schools will receive the first in a series of critical votes this Thursday evening when Board of Education members gather at the Weichsel Center for their bi-monthly meeting.

If it wins the necessary support – first from the Board of Education, then from the Board of Finance, Town Council, and finally voters at a referendum – the construction plan, which is known as D-2 for short, would be rolled out in two phases.

In the first, an updated Kelley School would be built in the open field behind the existing structure; once this is ready, the old building would be demolished. At the same time, five new classrooms would be added to the existing building at South End School. This work would be completed by the start of the 2029-2030 school year. At that point Flanders would be shut down, with its students and staff redistricted to nearby schools.

In the second phase, which would get underway that same year, a new, smaller Derynoski School would be constructed in the field below the existing one, along with a dedicated building for special-needs students, the Karen Smith Academy. Once the new structure is occupied, it would be up to the town to decide what to do with the old Derynoski and Flanders buildings. 

The Board of Education already voted at its May 8 meeting last year to move ahead with phase one of the rebuild, postponing a decision on phase two. Recently, however, the Republican caucus on Town Council signaled that it was unwilling to throw its support behind any rebuild unless the Board voted to approve phases one and two together.

The reason for this move, according to Town Council Chair and Republican majority leader Paul Chaplinsky, is that his caucus wants clarity on the long-term plan. That way, he and other town leaders can initiate discussions about the future uses of Derynoski and Flanders – discussions that they hope will assuage residents’ fear that the buildings will be demolished or sold off for development.

Background for the Rebuild

The district first began weighing its options for the elementary schools in earnest in 2021. The basic issue, according to Superintendent Steve Madancy, is modernization. Since 1950, when Derynoski was built, and 1966, when Kelley and Flanders opened, not much has changed in their built structures except for such things as the installation of LED lighting. Due to their age, the buildings are not the warm, safe, and dry places they need to be. Furthermore, the operational costs associated with outdated HVAC systems are growing every year.

Another reason given for the rebuild has to do with utilization. Every school has a certain maximum number of students it can serve – roughly speaking, the number of classrooms multiplied by the largest allowable class size for the grades in question. It is more cost-effective, in terms of energy use and administrative overhead, to operate schools close to that maximum number, with 85 to 90% utilization considered optimal.

None of Southington’s elementary schools currently lies within that range. According to district figures, Thalberg has the highest figure, 83%, followed by South End (79%), Derynoski (77%), Oshana (76%), Strong (76%), Hatton (75%), and Kelley (74%), with Flanders an outlier at just 63%.

This underutilization reflects the fact that the size of the student population has been slowly declining over the past two decades. Elementary enrollments peaked at around 3,100 in 2010, and have dipped since then to about 2,660.

Going forward, Southington – unlike many communities in Connecticut – has recently seen a modest increase in both births and the number of people moving to town. For that reason elementary school enrollment is expected to climb slowly over the next few years before stabilizing around a new peak of 2,850. That increase should raise utilization rates slightly, but would still leave most schools below 85%, with Flanders, again, at just 69%.

How should the district address these two issues – and do so at the least cost, and with the least possible disruption to student learning? To provide some answers, the town brought on a trio of outside consulting firms to take a close look at the numbers and game out various solutions. Last April 1, representatives from the firms MP Planning Group, Colliers, and Studio Jaed gave a presentation at DePaolo Middle School where they sketched out a number of alternative plans labelled A, B, C, and D, with various sub-options. (A video of the presentation can be viewed here.)

The reasoning that led them to recommend plan D-2 comes down to this: once implemented, it would ensure all students in the district were going to school in comfortable, modern, energy-efficient facilities, achieve an 88 percent utilization rate, and carry the smallest price tag. And that is the plan that is on the table now.

Chart summarizing the pros and cons of various plans for upgrading the four schools. SCREENSHOT FROM SOUTHINGTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS PRESENTATION

Criticisms of the Plan

There is broad consensus within town that something needs to be done about its three oldest elementary schools. The construction of a new Kelley school has been received favorably, with some parents even calling for timeline on the project to be sped up.

But there have been plenty of criticisms as well. For starters, plan D-2 would not come cheap: last April the total budget for both phases was given as $173.7 million, of which the town’s share would be $97.2 million, paid for by issuing bonds. While the town has a top-notch credit rating, something that would keep the interest share of its debt service under control, it would need to budget an additional few million dollars each year to cover the cost of the project in the decades to come. Updated estimates for the project’s total cost will be presented at this Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.

A key sticking point for many residents is the proposed closure of Flanders. Some of those who went to school there or sent their children to Flanders have lamented the loss of a building that holds treasured memories. On the Facebook page Southington Talks, Sherrie Shover touched off a discussion that elicited more than 260 comments by writing, “I am not in support of this [closure], being a Flanders alumni myself and having a kids currently in and about to enter Flanders. I understand it's coming down to funding, and consolidation is needed for the other school projects to happen, but we don't need fewer schools here in town, especially a lovely neighborhood school. Isn't that why we live in Southington, for neighborhood schools like Flanders? It's one reason I wanted to stay in this town and live in the Flanders district.”

Like Shover, Board members Joe Baczewski and Terri Carmody noted after last April’s presentation that closing Flanders would fly in the face of the educational ideal called ‘neighborhood schools.’ This is the idea that students benefit from proximity to their schools because it allows them to have neighbors as classmates and shortens commute times; since schools also serve as hubs of community activity, proximity often means stronger community connection.

Another common criticism of the plan has to do with open space. Some commenters, especially on social media, have foreseen an endgame where the closing of Flanders gives the town the chance to sell the land to a developer and so eliminate one of the last tracts of unbuilt land in that area of town. In recent years, local resistance to new development has grown increasingly stiff, and the Flanders project has now become another flashpoint for this issue.

 

Weighing the Pros and Cons

The response to the first two criticisms has generally been to note that none of the alternatives are any better – they either allow conditions at the old schools to deteriorate further, are more disruptive to students’ educational experience, or cost more than the town can afford.

The consultants started by gaming out a scenario in which the town brought the facilities at the existing Kelley, Flanders, and Derynoski buildings up to modern standards. These upgrades would cost over $120 million – and leave the district with the same low utilization rate of about 80%.

The advantages of replacing Derynoski with a new school about one-third smaller than the original quickly became clear. Building a new school on a smaller footprint was actually projected to cost much less than upgrading the old one. So the question then became whether to close Kelley or Flanders.

One reason Flanders was chosen is that it has the lowest current utilization. Another is that it is in the close proximity to schools, Hatton and Thalberg, where students could be reassigned without added travel time; closing Kelley, by contrast, would put a commuting strain on families to its west.

Finally, the consultants determined that Flanders is not favorably situated for a rebuild. The current structure is on the best part of the site in terms of accessibility, and putting a building in any other location would create access difficulties. For Kelley, this is much less of a problem.

Urbin T. Kelley Elementary School

What to Do with the Old Buildings?

As for what will happen to the former Derynoski and Flanders buildings, no concrete proposals have been spelled out yet. That said, at a recent Districtwide Facilities Committee meeting, Chaplinsky floated some possibilities which share a common assumption – that the old Derynoski building and the Flanders school and field would remain in town hands.

One idea brought up at the meeting is to turn Derynoski into a multi-use building, with the classrooms converted into low-income units run by the town’s Housing Authority, the gym becoming a recreational venue, and the auditorium a space for community theater. Speaking of Flanders, Chaplinsky said it might make sense to consolidate various town operations there that are currently housed in smaller buildings all over Southington.

These ideas are very tentative, and could well hit unforeseen roadblocks; final decisions on the buildings’ use may have to wait for years. That said, town leaders have expressed a desire to preserve the structures, and in public meetings no one has advocated for turning them over to developers.

The Board of Education will vote on plan D-2 this Thursday, February 19. If it passes, it will then go to the Board of Finance and the Town Council. Should it also be approved there, phase one of the plan will go to a town-wide referendum, with a vote tentatively scheduled for June 2.

Walter A. Derynoski Elementary School